Tag Archives: Russel Norman

As Andrew Little, Grant Robertson and the rest of the Labour caucus scratch around for relevant economic ideas, they could do worse than to go past Mariana Mazzucato, an academic at the University of Sussex and champion of state led innovation and intervention in a mixed rather than pure market economy. In 2013 Mazzucato wrote […]

As Andrew Little and the rest of the Labour Party heirachy sit down to decide policy and strategy for the next 3 years, they would do well to consider this Gordon Campbell interview with Bryan Gould. Yes Gould is part of a review committee that is reporting back to Labour on its election defeat but I […]

If you had a friend with an expensive house, nice car and a business, what would you think if he told you for the last 6 years that he had been able to keep his business going and maintain his lifestyle by borrowing huge sums of money against his assets, hoping that things would get […]

The debt problems of the Christchurch and Auckland City Councils have been in the news of late. Now I’m not going to defend the records of the last few administrations in those cities. In Auckland in particular there seems to be a meglomaniac desire to become a “global centre” with all the trappings, to play […]

Realpolitik, the belief that politics should be pragmatic and based on “reality” rather than any form of utopian or moral ideology. By moving to the banal center of New Zealand politics, that empty wasteland where policies and ideas are reduced to a single sentence or 30 second sound bite, where the debate is framed by […]